Processing photos sometimes seems like a challenge of matching a photograph with a filter. Sometimes a good match comes about by accident or experimentation. For me though, most of the time when I see something, before I even take the photo, I have an idea of what I want the final result to look like. When I took this photo for example:

ISO 500 50mm f/8.0 1/80

It was this that I saw in my mind:

ISO 500 50mm f/8.0 1/80

I only had a moment to snap the photo, so made sure everything was in focus and took the shot. I was interested in the imposing nature of the stone contrasted with the organic spiderwebs that looked like they were permanently attached. I kept that in mind as I went to crop the photo. In Photoshop I used the crop restraints of 1×1 to create a square. I also straightened the image, but not entirely. I wanted to keep that idea that the man made object was attempting to dominate the scene but that was not completely possible. Time and weather have taken their toll on this piece of stonework.

When I created this final version, instead of using a black and white filter I went more with a cream, I think that it brought out the weathered look of the stone better. To me these edits bring out what I saw when I was looking at the scene. What do you think? Do you ever think about photo editing as a matchmaking exercise? Feel free to leave a comment below.